“There has been a long history of people with more power or more privilege using more familiar names or forms of address, like dropping titles, to create a sense of intimacy without the permission of the other person.”

Criticism of US tropes in fiction. Some of those seem post-Enlightenment, Western tropes to me… plus y’all know how I feel about literacy rights, so the assumption that people in a nation with dramatically rising rates of illiteracy “can’t be bothered” to deal with subtitles is weird to me. Other than those two points, I really agree with the poster’s main point: that there’s a Western/American stranglehold on media production.

Also, in googling the links above, I found this really neat concept for teaching reading.

Shaun: Lincoln didn’t hold racist beliefs, but it talked about how pretending “everyone was (equally) racist back then so ______ was okay”

I’ve been hearing people say, “But that was the 80s!” to excuse racism from that decade, so it’s really hitting me lately that this has been the excuse for centuries. I was a kid then – in rural West Virginia, no less – and I know we knew better than to be racist. There was no excuse then, and there was never any excuse.

Thanks for the rec – I’ve stuck it in my Amazon cart.

Shaun: I’m pretty sure lots of whites today would be appalled by giving “their” land over to blacks, but none of the slave-owners did anything to create that wealth, and they didn’t even know how to maintain their own fields without hiring ex-slaves back on as paid workers.

Good point! It’s amazing how people manage to work out to the penny what they deserve from their own labor, but not notice how they’ve profited off other people’s labor.

I’m still not sure which link we’re talking about (that’s what I asked Mintywolf), because I didn’t see any of what Mintywolf is describing in the link on the word “Criticism.” I agree with that article, and also with your criticism of it.

🙂 I’m pretty sure we’re talking about the criticism link, and that Mintywolf is reacting to some of the commenters, and not to the post content, which does not contain the points MW is bringing up here.

I think I found what Mintywolf was talking about, and it IS from the article: “I’m tired of how genre(s) put(s) a disproportionate value on heroes who are active and not passive (and, by extension, belittles and dismisses every use of passive voice, and always asks for sentences to be frenetically punchy)… I am sick of the redefinition of narrative as violence, of how everything has to be a conflict in order to be valid–even to the point of defining conflict “against yourself”, which contributes to trivialising the use of the word “conflict”, not to mention twist it far beyond its original meaning.”

I don’t read this at all as Mintywolf did:

The passive voice DOES have artistic merit. English class and creative writing classes teach us that we should mainly use active voice, because they’re worried about keeping awake an audience that doesn’t want to be there, anyway. That’s a strangely American cultural value: always chasing the one you don’t got. Readers like Anne Rice know that some of us want to get lost for hours in a novel rather than skim for a book report, and they use passive voice to set up an unreal, nostalgic or dreamy sense, or convey that some characters are more passive/submissive than others, etc.

As for “conflict”, there’s a HUGE BIG GRAY AREA between cramming conflict everywhere you possibly can until it’s no longer possible to buy your characters haven’t all murdered each other already, and you wish they would because they’re behaving so ridiculously, and people sitting around being endlessly pleasant to each other. I have to say it’s also kind of a weirdly American cultural trait to assume if someone objects to Extreme A, they must support Extreme Z. Again, folks: HUGE BIG GRAY AREAS EVERYWHERE. Twenty-four other letters to choose from along the spectrum.

Does anyone know of a term for the logical fallacy that is assuming someone who objects to one extreme must support the opposite extreme? It’s sort of a False Dichotomy with a touch of Straw Man, but I was hoping to find a more descriptive term for that specific assumption, because it’s derailed more than a few threads around here.

What’s ironic is that I’m almost certain the Americanization! tropes are amplified and condensed when American screen writers try to market to a global audience. When you’re trying to get a plot light and uncomplicated as possible, action! and violence and clear oppositional morality and sexy women are pretty near the simplest things to translate.

Mintywolf: I’m not sure I agree with the blogger about fiction tropes. Conflict and character are what create stories, and using an active voice when writing is generally more descriptive and indeed interesting.

I think the above doesn’t sound like you were expressing an opinion, but more like you were stating a fact about writing and stories. I think this is what Jenn and I were responding to from your initial post. Thanks for clarifying!

Ditto. Though I still think this is an unfounded conclusion: “They seem to be arguing that they want to see stories/movies/etc about people sitting around being culturally homogenous watching things they aren’t involved in going on around them.” That’s why I kept emphasizing the big gray areas.

This doesn’t actually qualify as a LoGI or news but I just wanted to point out (if you weren’t already aware) that the next tropical storm will be Maria and that little glimmer in the southeast could be her already: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index.shtml

IANA fashion designer, but those Afros look too plain to me. The first thing I want to do when I see a glorious head of hair is ornament it with anything from one perfect flower to a one-of-a-kind piece of wearable art serving as a hairband. But again, IANA fashion designer.